


Eighteen Hours

by eighteen_hours



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-01-03 06:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1067341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eighteen_hours/pseuds/eighteen_hours
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sasha reflects on the events that led them to going down in the hull of a broken titan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eighteen Hours

**Author's Note:**

> This will be an on-going series if there's enough interest. I haven't decided yet how far I want to take it, but I'm open to continuing the story.

He was never a strong swimmer. The recruitment officer laughed in their faces when he heard this. Not many people had the stones to laugh in Aleksis Kaidonovsky’s face.

"He’s all muscle," Sasha, as usual, was left to do the talking. And anyway, she could see her husband working himself up into a silent, frothy rage. She put one hand on his shoulder, an automatic gesture of calming. "And he panics. Flaps like a chicken and then sinks like a brick. It’s no trouble," she flashed the recruiter a crooked smile, "I swim well enough for the both of us."

"We don’t usually take pilots in pairs," the man said. Stout and bald, he reeked of stale cigars and that morning’s bitter, rationed coffee. He scratched an unevenly stubbled jaw, eyes roaming up and up to cover Aleksis’ height as he loomed next to Sasha. "But…" He gave a shrug as if to say, oh what the hell? and slid two applications across the desk. Sasha put her hands over the papers, nervous the man would change his mind and tug the applications back into his dark little protective hovel behind the screen. Chuckling, the recruiter gave Aleksis one last dubious glance. "I’m not sure the uniforms come in Category 2."

"They’ll make an exception," Sasha said, gathering up the applications and shuffling them into order. "Believe me, for us they’ll make an exception."

She swaggered away from the desk, Aleksis lumbering at her side. Big as he was, he always managed to walk silently, oddly light on his feet.

"I’m glad you’re so confident, _dorogoi moi_ ,” he rumbled. They sat in the corner with the best lighting. Nobody had vacuumed or dusted the office in ages. A small digital clock sat on the dusty table littered with PPDC propaganda pamphlets. The damn clock was the brightest thing in the room. Sasha glanced at her husband, situating himself in a comically tiny chair.

"Confidence gets us in the door," she replied. "Skill will get us in a Jaeger."

"So it’s skill that will get us killed," Aleksis muttered. "Good to have that cleared that up."

"We can go back to the prison if it suits you better."

He fell silent at that, staring at nothing in particular across the room. His jaw worked slowly back and forth, grinding. By way of answering, Aleksis shifted his application toward her and she took it, lightly writing in his name and birthdate. His handwriting was nearly illegible, his hamhock fists making messy work of pens and pencils that looked like toothpicks in his grasp.

"No more prison work," he said gruffly. Sasha nodded, then coughed to cover up a distinct rumbling coming from her stomach. The prison didn’t pay enough, not even close to enough. That morning, while putting on her lipstick, Aleksis wrapped his hands over her ribs and squeezed, frowning at her in the mirror, fussing over her like a giant, bearded babushka. "Not good," he said, shaking his head, "did you eat this morning?"

"Yes, of course, love," she had lied. The last egg and mock-bread was for him. She would manage. But Aleksis was starting to notice the way her clothes fit too loosely, the way her skin stretched thin across her visible ribcage.

That day was the last shift at the prison. Clocking out, weary and stooped, Aleksis had turned to her and said, in his off-hand but never off-hand way, “We could eat like royalty if we joined the program.”

"That would be a big change," was her even reply. This wasn’t the first time the subject had come up between them, but in the past it was her pushing for them to apply. As they put on their heavy coats and bundled up for the winter weather, she winked. "Is that your way of saying we’re drift compatible?"

"Ha." He rolled his eyes at her, but he was smiling. "We knew that already."

Aleksis patted her rear gently as they walked out of the prison and into the cold.

Now, in the recruitment office, Aleksis gazed down at the application she was filling in for him. “That’s not how you spell my mother’s name…”

"I’m sure they won’t mind."

His mother had died just a few months earlier. The family claimed it was old age, but they both knew it wasn’t so. Little packages arrived from her - tins of chicken and fish, crackers, cookies… And always with sweet, breezy messages, never hinting at the hardship they all endured together. Aleksis was her oldest, her little bear. Stay strong, her last letter said, stay strong and healthy, my little bear.

Sasha erased the mistake and had Aleksis spell it for her.

She winced, coming to the line marked RELATIONSHIP STATUS. The recruiters would see their matching last names and their marital status and - she could just imagine it now - roll their eyes. Couples applied for the program all the time, convinced they were drift compatible. Convinced their love was just that special. It would be easier, she thought, to be rejected now and not later, when they ran the simulations and tests and discovered that they weren’t compatible. What would that say about them?

His application finished, she flipped to her own and started to write.

"I still love to see you write that," Aleksis said, stopping her by placing his hand over hers on the paper.

"Hmm?" She glanced up absently only to have him brush a wisp of pale blonde hair out of her face.

"My name," he added, "tacked onto yours. Little train cars linked, always headed in the same direction."

_We’re drift compatible. I know it._ She leaned across the chair arms and kissed his chin, then wiped away the lipstick smudge. _I know it._

He was never a strong swimmer, and now in the churning, broken remains of Cherno’s pod, he wouldn’t stand a chance. She had to find him, had to save him. Sasha ripped at the coils of wire clinging to her like a hundred grasping hands. Oxygen. No panicking. Conserve energy. How to stay calm, she wondered, when she could feel the alarming numbness in her right leg? Even if she found him, how would she drag them back to shore with half her body serving as nothing but deadweight?

They were going down, dragged to the bottom of the bay by the weight of the Jaeger’s lifeless hull. The acid had torn an opening, one she had focused on even as the heat of the engines erupting and dying flared behind them. Did she even have skin anymore? Burned up and broken. This was not how she imagined their end. Last desperate thoughts… Last flashes of consciousness before the water took them.

_No._ She twisted, wrenching to the left hard, feeling the wires finally snap free from her ragged suit. The lenses of her visor had shattered, and she ripped it from her head, peering into the murky mess of leaking fuel and charred, metallic debris. Through the swirling water she could just make out the hole in Cherno’s head where the acid had burned through, the edges still tinged with an unnatural blue glow. She could swim for it now, but not alone…

With her one good leg she kicked off from the piloting rig and swam to the left. What calm she had managed to collect fled. Empty. His place was empty. She tread, looking down, above… He had to be there somewhere. He wasn’t the type to melt into the surroundings. A flash of red could be his helmet, a smudge of green his suit, but there was nothing, just the muddy water pressing in harder around her as Cherno sank to the bottom of the bay.

Then she would die. She wasn’t leaving without him. The final explosion must have blown a gap down into the core, and Aleksis would be there, waiting for her.

Swim her mind insisted. Drown, her heart replied.

Sasha thrashed, a sudden pain exploding in her right shoulder. So that part of her was shot, too, hardly surprising. But the feeling… She twisted up and to the right, toward the surface. Something lurked in the water above her, something too big and familiar to be debris.

_But you were always such a terrible swimmer._

He pulled and the pain thrummed through her again, but they were floating upward, through the burned gap and into the dirty waters above. They were leaving their Cherno behind, free of it, but still dragged down by the whirlpools kicked up by its drowning bulk. Aleksis strained and strained against the pull of the water, and she kicked with what little strength she had left. Faint lights danced on the surface above, so distant it might have been miles and miles…

_There’s not enough air, we’ll never break the surface._

Sasha covered Aleksis’ hand where it held her shoulder. They were being sucked down, fighting as they were, connected there at just one point, there would never be enough air. She squeezed his hand and kicked alongside him anyway; making it back didn’t seem to matter so much anymore.


End file.
